Report: Facebook is announcing a mobile ad network on April 30

Facebook will announce its mobile ad network at its F8 developer conference at the end of the month, according to a report in Recode. Facebook’s still-unnamed mobile ad network will deliver advertisements directly to third-party mobile apps.

Back in January, Sriram Krishnan, a mobile product developer, posted on the Facebook Developers blog announcing an internal trial to place ads on other companies’ apps. Since that post, Facebook has added two major standalone apps to its stable: Paper was announced a week later, and WhatsApp was purchased less than a month afterwards.

According to Recode, mobile ads generated $1.24 billion for Facebook in the fourth quarter of 2013, of which a large proportion came from “app-install” ads. Twitter unveiled its own mobile-app install ad unit earlier this month. Google is experimenting with its own mobile ad network, and last September, Twitter purchased MoPub, which at the time was the world’s largest mobile ad exchange.